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some of you guys are really divulging out of scope, for instance aardpsymon where the hell does heat management come in? (more importantly how did you arrive at that figure of 1000 joules per second? that isn't fact) and why do you assume the guy's question is flawed nihil?? he simply wants to know what components are found in a typical server in a data center end of story.
And i would only assume that the reason he didn't google it is because he needs somewhere to turn back to easily incase he gets stuck or shizzer hits the fan.

So without the bull crap here it is - raid 5 or 1, rundant PSU, dual Xeon or other 64bit CPU's, 2x1000meg NIC, SCSI adapters (for backups more than one. after all this is a datacenter server we r talkin about). Usually a V4 drive is entry level. Please note this is not comprehensive any one fell differently by all means mention the missing essential COMPONENTS of a TYPICAL SERVER of a DATACENTER

Hey, cybersamurai old chap, I am not criticising in the slightest........ just trying to find out a bit more so as to give a better answer?

The question is never flawed, but my answer might be?

I am afraid that I have given bad advice in the past, because I didn't ask the right questions........... MLF knows that

If you cannot do someone any good: don't do them any harm....
As long as you did this to one of these, the least of my little ones............you did it unto Me.
What profiteth a man if he gains the entire World at the expense of his immortal soul?

Since this is a forum, cybersamurai, more than ONE person can answer a question---EVERYONE gives input, and the one asking the question can take all the info and get good tips from EVERYONE'S collective answers. Nobody gives "incorrect" answers to this---people are speaking from experience and trying to help. If I said I found one with a tomato garden in it, then esi1 would probably think that he would NOT want a tomato garden in the server he's building...does that make MY answer wrong? No matter what you think, it is NOT all about YOU! Like Forrest Gump says, that's all I have to say about that.

This question is to varied to provide a proper answer without knowing more. I like the approach of looking at the requirements and providing the hardware to meet those requirements. I can think of plenty of machines running in datacenters that for whatever reason don't require a high level of redundancy and don't have redundancy built in. Not common, but it does happen based on need...

for instance aardpsymon where the hell does heat management come in?

Start dealing with a datacenter that is over 50k square feet with over 5,000 servers and heat management becomes a huge deal. He has no clue what kind of environment the OP is in, so talking about heat management for servers is an important aspect of proper management of a server environment.

I have servers that require 4 HBA's, 5 NICs, 8 Internal 15k RPM SCSI drives, as well as two external fiber networks. One for backup and one for SAN. SAN enclosures requirements can get even crazier depending on the IOPS and overall system load. Point being that what defines a minimum server is the requirements for whatever is going to be running on that server. There is no right or wrong answer.

As far as the question around tape drives it depends on what kind of tape drive you are using. LTO-2 drives can store 200GB and approach 1.8GB/min. Far faster than you can get with a dvd drive. LTO-6 drives can store 3.2TB and approach 16.2GB/minute. We usually require atleast LTO-2 drives for machines with very large databases. My new environment will have dramatically larger databases than anything I've backed up before and we will probably be using atleast LTO-3 or 4 tapes along with extremely large disk enclosures dedicated to VSS snapshots.

Heat management can be a big deal, and it does not need to be 50K sq ft for it to come into play. My company supports offices in cramped spaces, and they have like 20 DL360's in one rack---now THAT room can get hot! They do have A/C in there...
As for tape drives, whatever you do, do NOT get an Exabyte!
As for the brand of server, I am particular about Sun, especialy the Sunfire V880---I also like Alphas.
That is yet another consideration---OS. If you are familiar with Solaris (UNIX), then I would definitely consider a Sun. If you only know Windows, then I prefer HP/Compaq servers, especially the DL series (I like the 380's, for RAID0+1 and RAID5---they hold 6 SCSI drives).